Easing our Existence
AI makes our lives easier, but it is complicating our Existence. The challenge is to make it ease our Existence and complicate our lives.
We have been sold the idea that Artificial Intelligence is here to make our lives easier. And it really has. It writes for us, calculates for us, designs occupational safety and health (OSH) protocols for us… and, in this excess of care, in this exaggerated effort to make everything easier, it has complicated our Existence.
It is leaving us with more time and less meaning. It is generating more answers than the questions we are asking it. Most dangerously, we are entering the territory of replacing our human judgement with judgement based on matrix calculations: cold, distant and without compassion… without nuance or consideration for equality or special needs.
At ORP 2027 in Lima, we propose turning this around. Let us use AI for what is critical, for the pursuit of Zero risk, for what matters: to ease our Existence.
Let us try to make AI help us ensure that work does not kill, cause illness or injure. Let us extend OSH to all workers, both those employed by legally established companies or organisations and those who earn their living through informal work. A worker working at height should have the same protection regardless of their legal status, and we should ensure that they return home in the same optimal condition as an executive who has enjoyed good OSH protection in their office.
And, on the other hand, let us allow AI to complicate our lives and push us, compel us, to study again, to demonstrate the skills we claim to have… to refuse to settle.
That is the AI we are interested in. Not the kind that makes life easy, but the kind that makes our Existence more human.
Pedro R. Mondelo
ORP Director
